FDR and Nixon came close before, in the 1942 against journalists at the Chicago Tribune, and in 1973 against reporters at the NYT in the Pentagon Papers case. Obama nearly indicted Assange in 2011 but pulled back because his administration knew that to prosecute a journalist for publishing could invite a constitutional crisis with the First Amendment and turn the media against him.
Well Trump took that chance. And how has the media reacted? On the day of Assange's arrest there were editorials that recognized the lethal threat to a free press. After that there has been mostly silence.
After all, Assange has shamed the media profession. He has done the job they should have been doing and scooped them badly. For decades, with few exceptions, the media have cozied up to power and covered up their crimes. They've explained away the coups and the invasions and the surveillance as good for spreading democracy and "protecting" the West -- especially America -- from hyped up or non-existant threats.
This is why so many people in the West find it so hard to support a journalist who exploded so many myths about their leaders, about their country and about themselves. They have been led to believe that political repression and extreme secrecy only takes place in those other countries: the Soviet Union, Russia, China and any developing country that objects to American bullying.
Assange helped make it possible for Westerners to understand what is wrong with their governments and their foreign aggression. But many don't want to know. They are attached to their national identities and turn on him for making them doubt what they believe are their governments' good intentions -- to spread democracy, for instance, instead the reality of its geo-strategic and economic influence.
It's time for people to shed this fake innocence and embrace universal human values -- not the so-called Western values -- and to defend Assange and the profession of journalism as it should be practiced -- and as he has.
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